July 11, 1969: Royals come back three times to defeat White Sox

Two teams with losing records and subpar pitching staffs slugged it out in a back-and-forth contest that featured 13 runs, 9 pitchers, 4 errors, and half a dozen ties and lead changes before the first-year Royals finally prevailed 8-5 over the White Sox. Royals rookie Don O’Riley won his only major-league victory in front of his hometown fans.

The Royals were coming off their worst stretch of play during their inaugural season. After a surprising 21-21 start, the team was just 15-28 in its next 43 games, a .349 clip that saw the Royals drop from third place in the division, 3½ games out of first, to fifth place, 13½ games out. They surrendered five-plus runs per game in that stretch, a full run more than the league average, but they had 22-year-old rookie Bill Butler starting for them that day, and he’d been pitching well to that point, posting a 4-4 record with a 3.63 ERA that included a 1-0 shutout of the Angels nine days earlier.

To oppose Butler, the White Sox started veteran and former All-Star Gary Peters. Like his team, Peters, the 1963 Rookie of the Year, had slipped in recent years, and was coming off a poor season in 1968 with a record of 4-13. But he’d shown flashes of his earlier effectiveness, including a two-hit shutout of Oakland in his previous start, on July 7. This was first start against the Royals.

Despite a game-time temperature of 90 degrees that left the visitors drenched in sweat,1 both the White Sox and Peters got off to a good start. Walt “No Neck” Williams, in his first season as an everyday player and in the only season in which he posted a batting average over .300, led off the game with a double to right field. Two batters later, rookie Carlos May brought him home for the game’s first run. Peters gave up a leadoff single to Pat Kelly in the bottom of the inning, followed by a bunt single by Jackie Hernández, but then retired the heart of the Royals’ order to end the threat.

The lead held until the bottom of the third, when the wheels began to come off for Peters, who started the inning by walking Royals pitcher Butler. Kelly then tried a sacrifice bunt, which Peters fielded, but he was late in his attempt to get Butler at second base, putting runners on first and second with no outs.2 Hernandez also tried a bunt, and this time Peters was able to get the lead runner, Butler, at third base. Then he caught Royals second baseman Paul Schaal looking at a third strike for the second out. It appeared Peters might get out of the jam he had created, but he couldn’t get a third strike past the Royals cleanup hitter and ultimate Rookie of the Year Award winner, Lou Piniella, who fouled off five pitches before lining a 2-and-2 pitch over the left-field wall for a three-run homer and a 3-1 Royals lead.3 It was Piniella’s team-leading 10th home run of the season.

Butler managed to hold that lead for the next two innings, though he did surrender Bill Melton’s 14th homer of the season in the top of the fifth inning. His luck didn’t hold in the sixth, when he allowed singles to May and Don Pavletich, with an error by second baseman Schaal sandwiched between them that allowed future Royal Gail Hopkins to reach safely. Royals manager Joe Gordon pulled Butler at that point, handing the game and a bases-loaded jam over to veteran Moe Drabowsky. After a strikeout, Melton singled to drive in May and Hopkins for his second and third RBIs of the game. Drabowsky got the next two hitters, but the lead had been surrendered again as the White Sox led 4-3.

The see-saw battle continued in the bottom of the inning, when Peters surrendered a single to Ellie Rodríguez to start the inning. Rodríguez was bunted to second by Juan Ríos, and then scored on a single by Buck Martinez, who pinch-hit for Drabowsky and took second on an errant throw by center fielder Buddy Bradford. That tied the game, and the Royals took a 5-4 lead one batter later when Kelly doubled for his second hit of the game. White Sox manager Don Gutteridge, who had taken over the team from Hall of Famer Al López upon his retirement in early May, replaced Peters with Dan Osinski, and he got out of the inning without further damage.

Dave Wickersham started the seventh inning for the Royals, but neither he nor the Royals’ new lead lasted long. Leadoff batter Walt Williams bunted down the third-base line and beat Wickersham’s throw to first. He was sacrificed to second by future Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio. May followed with his third hit, a single to deep third base that put runners on the corners with one out. Hopkins doubled down the right-field line, chasing Williams home with the tying run and sending Gordon to the mound to replace the shaky Wickersham with lefty Tom Burgmeier. He faced one batter, Ed Herrmann, who had entered the game at the White Sox catcher the inning before after Pavletich had been pulled for a pinch-runner. Burgmeier did his job, getting Herrmann to hit a groundball to Schaal, now playing third base. May broke for home on contact, and Schaal’s throw beat him easily for the second out. May and Rodriguez exchanged words after the play when May went into home standing up in a failed attempt to knock the ball loose.4

With right-handed hitters coming up, Gordon went to the bullpen again, bringing in O’Riley as the Royals’ fifth pitcher. O’Riley, who grew up in Kansas City and had made his big-league debut only three weeks earlier, walked Bradford to load the bases, but then got Melton on a fly ball to left field to end the threat and send the game to the seventh-inning stretch tied 5-5. The Royals were retired in order in the bottom of the inning, and O’Riley did the same to the White Sox in the top of the eighth.

The deciding runs were scored in the bottom of the eighth. With one out, Rodríguez singled off Osinski and went to second when Aparicio, the defending American League Gold Glove winner at shortstop, made an error on Rios’s groundball. That put runners on first and second for the pitcher’s spot in the lineup. Hawk Taylor was sent up to hit for O’Riley, and he delivered the Royals’ second pinch-hit of the game, a single to center field scoring Rodríguez and putting runners on the corners. Osinski was pulled in favor of knuckleballer Wilbur Wood, who walked Kelly to load the bases. After Wood struck out Hernández, Schaal stroked a two-run single to left, making the score 8-5 before Wood got Piniella on a fly ball to end the scoring.

Mike Hedlund entered in the ninth for the Royals and pitched a scoreless inning, earning his first career save in locking down O’Riley’s first and only major-league victory. O’Riley had worked an inning and a third without allowing a hit. Though he eventually worked in 27 major-league games, he finished with a career record of 1-1.5

The back-and-forth nature of the game mirrored the two teams’ positions in the standings for most of the 1969 season. They finished one game apart in fourth and fifth place in the new American League West, with O’Riley’s lone career victory proving to be the deciding margin for his hometown Royals to finish a game ahead of Chicago in their first year of existence.

Acknowledgements

This article was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Trading Card DB.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for all statistics, transactions, and box-score information.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/KCA/KCA196907110.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1969/B07110KCA1969.htm

Notes

1 Richard Dozer, “Royals Get 3 in 8th for 8-5 Victory,” Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1969: 59.

2 Paul O’Boynick, “Piniella Swat Bats in Three,” Kansas City Times, July 12, 1969: 1D.

3 O’Boynick.

4 Dozer, 60.

5 O’Riley was selected by the Royals from Oakland in the 1968 expansion draft.